Archives-October 2014

The aim of this study was to examine factor structure and explore the psychometric properties for Urdu version of Test Anxiety Inventory. 2,145 secondary and higher secondary science students were selected as sample from the Punjab province in Pakistan appearing in 10th grade Board examinations. The value of alpha reliability for TAI was .893 in the pilot study. But in the final study, alpha reliability values for different scales of TAI (TAI-Total, TAI-Worry, and TAI-Emotionality) ranged from 0.66 to 0.81 with the individual student as the unit of analysis and from 0.71 to 0.88 with the class as the unit of analysis. Similarly, The discriminant validity of an individual student as unit of analysis ranged from 0.19 to 0.32 for three scales of TAI, while the discriminant validity for class as unit of analysis ranged from 0.27 to 0.40 for these scales of TAI. A three-factor structure consisting of TAI-Total, TAI-worry and TAI-Emotionality components showed acceptable discriminant validity and internal reliability.

This paper describes a research methodology which was developed to study the implementation of Hospital Autonomy Reforms in Pakistan. The research attempted to answer two questions: what happened? And why did it happen? (with regards to the implementation process of hospital autonomy reforms). The environment for this study was very political and characterized by high power distance and low rule of law. Moreover it had an aura of formality and reservation. Few respondents were willing to share information due to their status and busyness. The researcher had to develop a strategy to be flexible and innocuous to be able to accumulate relevant information. Moreover, respondents would rarely honor any official request for information about the process, so the researcher had to use personal connections to gain entry into the environment and to extract data. Main stakeholders were donors, politicians, bureaucrats and doctors. Long unstructured interviews were conducted with them. For the second question, the technique of sense making was used to find out why reform adopted the specific strategy that it took. Use of contextual historical back ground data was made in this regards.

Over the years, horticulture emerged as a crucial and emerging part of agriculture, offering a wide range of choices to the farmers for crop diversification. It also provides sufficient opportunities for sustaining large number of agro industries which generate substantial employment opportunities. In India, there are a number of major fruits like banana, mango, citrus, papaya, apple, litchi, pineapple and many others. If we talk about the area covered under fruits we have found out that there is almost 100% increase in the area and 121% increase in production. Specifically speaking Apple is by far the most important fruit. Today, India ranks second in the world in terms of area under apple cultivation. With 2.5 million hectares under cultivation, India produces more than 1.4 million tonnes of apples every year (FAO). Among the fruit grown in India, apple has the third largest area under cultivation, after banana and mango. Being somewhat hard, the potential post-harvest losses in transportation are relatively low and shelf life compared to other tropical fruit grown in India is comparatively large.

Education system in India can be dated centuries back to the age of Buddha but, now there has in fact been substantial improvement in the higher education state of affairs of India in both quantitative and qualitative terms post globalization. The higher education system in India suffers from acute paucity of funds, lack of autonomy, burden of affiliation etc. It is characterized by extreme rigidity and lack of flexibility. The real weakness of the higher education is in the structure itself, and there is a need for introspection and reflection on what we have achieved and where do we go from here during the times of globalization on the other hand, the effects of globalization on education bring rapid developments in technology and communications are foreseeing changes within learning systems across the world as ideas, values and knowledge, changing the roles of students and teachers, and producing a shift in society from industrialization towards an information based society.

Higher education is assuming an upward significance for developing countries, especially countries including India which is experiencing service-led growth. Higher education is all about generating knowledge, encouraging critical thinking and imparting skills relevant to this society and determined by its needs. Education general and higher education in particular, is a highly nation-specific activity, determined by national culture and priorities. The growth of India's higher educational institutions has indeed been outstandingly rapid. The numbers of universities have doubled since 1990-91, and enrolment has become more than doubled. But this has been at the expense of quality, increased rigidity in course design, poor absorption of knowledge, and growing lack of access to laboratory facilities, journals and opportunities for field work, etc. The average Indian graduate compares poorly with her/his counterpart in most countries, including many developing ones. All this calls for reform, administrative changes, more funding, greater flexibility, quality improvement, etc.

A systematic vibrational spectroscopic assignment and analysis of sustiva(EFV) has been carried out by using FTIR, FT-Raman and UV spectral data. The vibrational analysis were aided by electronic structure calculations – ab initio (RHF) and hybrid density functional methods (B3LYP) performed with 6-31G(d,p) and 6-31++G(d,p) basis sets. Molecular equilibrium geometries, electronic energies, bond orders, natural bond order analysis, IR intensities, and harmonic vibrational frequencies have been computed. The assignments proposed based on the experimental IR and Raman spectra have been reviewed and selected assignment of the observed spectra have been proposed. UV–visible spectrum of the compound was also recorded and the electronic properties, such as HOMO and LUMO energies and ?max were determined by time-dependent DFT (TD-DFT) method. The thermodynamic functions of the title molecule were also performed using the RHF and DFT methods.

The purpose of writing the current paper is to formulate and rank strategies of Tehran Gas Company – one of the most powerful ones in Iran- by 2 different techniques: QSPM and fuzzy TOPSIS. After designing SWOT matrix and formulating 18 strategies, QSPM and fuzzy TOPSIS techniques were applied to rank strategies. The results of utilizing both techniques show that “Observing environmental, social and economical by employees’ training”, “Applying new technologies and utilization expert human resources to upgrade assessment and evaluation systems” and “Establishment affective customer relationship systems and projects timely execution to enhance liquidity and decrease the effect of inflation and sanctions” were selected as the most important ones but in different order. Finally by applying SAW technique two applied techniques were comprised in which showed fuzzy TOPSIS technique obtains better and more credible results.

Typical time series prediction methods used in many real-world applications. The proposed approach consists of an ARIMA methodology and feed-forward, backpropagation network structure with an optimized conjugated training algorithm. The hybrid approach for time series prediction is tested using 144-month observations of water quality data, including water temperature, Total dissolved solids (TDS) and Sodium adsorption ratio (SAR), during 1997–2008 at Karun river, Iran. The correlation coefficients between the hybrid model predicted values and observed data for TDS, SAR and water temperature are 0.935, 0.939, and 0.892, respectively, which are satisfactory in common model applications. Predicted water quality data from the hybrid model are compared with those from the ARIMA methodology and neural network architecture using the accuracy measures.

Steel-concrete composite systems for buildings are composed of concrete components that interact with structural steel components within the same system. By their integral behavior, these components give the required attributes of strength, stiffness and stability to the overall system. Composite members, as individual elements of a system, have been in use for a considerable number of years. In this paper, a review of the research carried out on composite columns with infills is given with emphasis on experimental work.

The inefficaciousness and ethical deficiency of the current “Islamic” financial industry is well known. Taking a diachronic approach whilst resorting to scriptural reasoning, historical evidence and inductive rationale, the author suggests two prerequisites for Islamic financing. The paper is concluded with five scenarios that are in the author’s view, sine qua nons as far as Islamic financing is concerned.